Thor

Essential, mostly for Loki, who becomes the antagonist of The Avengers and recurs for the next fifteen years. Everything else it establishes is restated later.

Kenneth Branagh was an unexpected choice and the reasoning is visible: the Asgard half is staged as Shakespeare, with a succession, a wronged younger son, a father who has lied to both of them, and a great deal of declaiming on gold steps. Tom Hiddleston plays Loki's whole arc in that register and it works because the film takes the family seriously.

The Earth half is a fish-out-of-water comedy in a New Mexico town and is thinner. Thor smashes a coffee cup, walks into a pet shop asking for a horse, and falls for an astrophysicist he has known for two days. Natalie Portman is given almost nothing, which the franchise took three films to correct.

The look has dated. Asgard is a gold render, the Bifrost is a rainbow, and the Destroyer sequence is the only action anybody remembers. The canted camera angles throughout became a standing joke. It is pleasant, minor, and the setup for something much better six years on.